Apollo 11 lunar module lands in Novato

Three workers hoisted a 4-foot-tall structure shaped like a giant apple slice into place on a lunar module replica at Novato's Space Station Museum Tuesday, almost 45 years to the day since the Apollo 11 moon landing.

The museum, tucked away in the Pacheco Plaza shopping center off Highway 101, just bought 15-foot replicas of the lunar module and lunar rover for a new interactive exhibit debuting Aug. 2. The lunar module was the first manned spacecraft to land on the moon; the rover was later used to traverse its surface.

"Nowhere else in California is there a lunar rover or module, either the original or a replica," said Ken Winans, president of the museum. "We're going to have some fun with this," he said of the interactive exhibit. "Every little kid is going to have to tell us what Neil Armstrong said."

Winans was referring, of course, to the words uttered just after Armstrong, the first human being to walk on the moon, stepped down from the ladder on July 20, 1969: "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

Children will get stickers with insignia of various NASA missions as a reward for correctly recalling the famous words, Winans said. They will also be able to don space boots and leave their own footprint in "lunar dust," a flour mixture, just as Armstrong did on the historic day when he landed on the moon as a team with Buzz Aldrin.

The museum, which opened in 2011, plans to unveil the fully assembled copies of the module and rover at 10 a.m. Aug. 2 in a ribbon-cutting ceremony with Apollo 12 astronaut Dick Gordon. The museum will hold a SpaceFest lasting all day, Winans said. The 3,000-square-foot museum is open four days a week and admission is free.

As a bevy of workers and volunteers buzzed around the 40-foot-wide, two-story-high Apollo Gallery Room assembling the module Tuesday, two passing children and their mom watched spellbound. The museum is a magnet for youngsters and older space buffs alike; several others wandered in over the space of an hour Tuesday.

"I had a business meeting next door so I dropped by," said Eric Johnson of Nicasio. "I've visited Cape Canaveral, the home of the Kennedy Space Center, and I was looking forward to coming here. This is not something you see every day in California — the MIR control panels and the pressure suit."

Johnson was referring to a complicated set of buttons and monitors displayed near the entrance to the museum, the MIR space station command control board panel. MIR was a space mission of the then-Soviet Union. The pressure suit on display at the museum resembles the one worn by Sandra Bullock in the movie "Gravity."

"We have a technical adviser on hand to make sure it (the module) will be absolutely detailed and accurate, Don Shields. He worked on the real one as a Grumman employee," said Winans. The Grumman Aerospace Engineering Corp. of Bethpage, Long Island, built the lunar module.

"I went through an access panel into the rocket on the Apollo 11 launch pad one or two days before the launch to make sure the equipment in the lunar module was correctly installed," said Shields, a Novato resident.

"I helped test the lunar module equipment. When Neil and Buzz couldn't be in the module (during testing), I was in it," Shields said.

Shields is lending his expertise to the museum pro bono. "We have 38 volunteers, and they are all willing to go the extra mile," Winans said.

In the case of volunteer David Nielsen, this is literally true. Nielsen drove the module 2,000 miles from Independence, Missouri, to Novato. The buggy is so big it won't fit through the museum door, so it lives part-time at the Pacific Air and Space Museum in Santa Rosa, said Debbie Wreyford, co-founder of the museum.

"We had no plans to start a museum," said Wreyford, who is married to Winans. "We had quite a few items in our house — a room we called the Moon Room. Friends would come over and instead of swimming in the pool, kids would want to hang out and try on the astronaut glove."

One thing led to another. Wreyford and Winans had a pop-up museum at Pacheco Plaza for the weekend "and it was so successful the plaza said, 'We have this empty space, why don't you go for it?'" Wreyford said.

"There was no strategy, no plan. It just organically happened. You can do amazing things when you follow your passion," Wreyford said. "If you find what really makes you excited in life and put your heart into it, you can accomplish incredible things, whether it's being an astronaut or a landscape architect."